Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

On May 20, 2008, at 4:26 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>
>> 3) The TAG's working hypothesis is that "aria:" is both technically  
>> feasible and strategically preferable, on the grounds that the  
>> long- term benefits of a consistent approach to extensibility  
>> across all the Web languages outweighs the short-term costs of  
>> making the change at this time:
>> (to the WAI PF WG): Would you consider specifying 'aria:' in the  
>> next WD of ARIA;
>> (to the implementers): Could you see your way to changing your  
>> implementation/spec. to comply?
>
> WebKit (the browser engine used in Safari and other browsers) now  
> has a partial implementation of ARIA on trunk.
>
> Prefixing ARIA attributes with aria: instead of aria- creates some  
> difficulties.
>
> 1) It would require changing the core architecture of the DOM to  
> match on localname+prefix instead of localname+namespaceURI in this  
> case. This core work would be risky, and may hurt performance. To  
> expand on this: WebKit's core DOM has a type called QualifiedName  
> which contains a localname, a prefix, and a namespaceURI. This class  
> is designed to carry a prefix but match exclusively on the prefix  
> and namespaceURI for equality comparisons and hashing.

Sorry, I meant to say "match exclusively on the *localname* and  
namespaceURI".

> It is used throughout the engine everywhere that names appear. It  
> would be challenging to support an exception to sometimes match  
> differently. I would also be worried about security risk from time- 
> of-check / time-of-use bugs if we had two different ways of matching  
> qnames.
>